Tim Lambert
tlambert
Posts by this author
December 10, 2007
In the olden days to become a distinguished climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel…
December 9, 2007
John Mashey has written an account of Monckton and Schulte vs Oreskes affair. Schulte seems to be guilty of professional misconduct.
December 8, 2007
Ben Thurley encounters a global warming denier at the Bali conference:
I just had my first conversation with a climate change sceptic/denier here at the UN Climate Change talks. I was at the Hadley Centre stand (it's a research unit associated with the UK Meteorological Office). Everything he said…
November 27, 2007
After Matt Drudge linked this Christopher Booker column in London's Daily Telegraph, the usual dupes are declaring global warming a myth. Booker claims:
the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly…
November 25, 2007
John Quiggin writes about the culture warmongers:
Third, and most importantly, the factoid-based, point-scoring, style of argument that goes with the culture wars eventually leads to complete insulation from factual reality. Any proposition, no matter how ridiculous, can be defended in this way,…
November 25, 2007
Caroline Overington has topped her previous effort with this:
Top journalist Caroline Overington has denied hitting George Newhouse, the Labor candidate for the Sydney seat of Wentworth - but he insists he was slapped, and it hurt. ...
A Labor campaigner, who witnessed the alleged slap, said…
November 23, 2007
I don't know whether it's that the Australian just hires journalists with really thin skins or that the water there contains some skin thinning chemical, but they always seem to overreact to criticism. The latest is from Caroline please preference Malcolm Overington.
You see, Gam blogged about…
November 22, 2007
Andrew Dessler contacted Steve Milloy's demanddebate.com to see if they could provide a global warming skeptic for debate. Alas, Milloy could not come up with one.
November 21, 2007
Discover has a good article on Rachel Carson, DDT and malaria. Unlike many other recently published articles (e.g. the New York Times) it gets the science right:
But elsewhere, the picture is murkier. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 500 million cases of malaria occur each…
November 18, 2007
Ray Pierrehumbert takes apart two French global warming skeptics, Claude Allègre and Vincent Courtillot. My favourite bit:
This flub is nothing compared to the trouble Courtillot's collaborator Le Mouël got into during the debates, when he was trying to show that the 1 Watt per square meter…
November 17, 2007
US delegates tried to water down the latest IPCC report:
US delegates in particular said references to "irreversible" climate change and impacts were imprecise.
They argued, for example, that the melting of glaciers or ice sheets -- which could raise ocean levels by several meters (a dozen feet…
November 17, 2007
The IPCC Forth Assessment Synthesis Report has been released. The Summary for Policy Makers is in Microsft Word format, so I've made a PDF version for easier reading.
A few extracts:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average…
November 16, 2007
Via James Hrynyshyn, Nature has a good summary of the state of climate politics in the lead up to Bali. There's even a decent summary of the state of play in Austrlia.
Any campaign veteran will tell you that voters are fickle, switching from candidate to candidate and issue to issue as the whim…
November 15, 2007
Gareth Renowden reports:
On Thursday morning, TVNZ's Breakfast Business programme included an interview with Baron Lawson of Blaby. It's available here. Nigel's opening statement is a shocker:
"There's no global warming happening at the present time. That's clear, accepted on all sides of the…
November 14, 2007
Richard Black continues his excellent series on climate scepticism with a look at the question of whether science journals are biased against warming skeptics. It turns out that they are not.
And he also examines the claims that the sun is the cause of current warming. Nope..
Hat tip:…
November 14, 2007
Andrew Revkin is normally a great reporter, so it is particularly disappointing when he turns in a shocker. He's fallen again for the attraction of a middle ground (see Middle Muddle for the previous occasion). If the IPCC says 2+2=4 and the CEI says 2+2=6, well Revkin reckons that Lomborg saying…
November 13, 2007
It's always good value when Media Watch criticizes The Australian because journalists there react with foaming-at-the-mouth outrage. For example, when Media Watch nailed them for misrepresenting Rajenda Pachauri they reacted with 4672 words blasting Media Watch, including the entire editorial,…
November 12, 2007
Back in August I wrote how Lott tried to amend his complaint against Levitt. Unfortunately for Lott, the judge rejected his proposed amendments as "futile and unduly delayed". So now Lott is appealing the decision. William Ford has the update.
November 12, 2007
The BBC has a nice piece listing and refuting the top 10 arguments used by global warming skeptics, while Richard Black has surveyed the 61 "scientists" who signed a letter opposing action to prevent warming.
November 11, 2007
Daniel Cressey summarizes the story of the spoof paper that pretended to prove that global warming was caused by benthic bacteria rather than humans. He also has an interview with the author of the spoof. David Thorpe, who helped set it up, explains why he did it on his blog.
Fooled were such…
November 9, 2007
Ed Darrell has been working his way through Steve Milloy's 100 things about DDT. See if you can spot what Milloy did in number 10. Here's Milloy:
[Rachel Carson wrote] "Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile…
November 8, 2007
Steve Milloy's Junk Science has now endorsed Climate Audit in the Weblog Awards, telling readers to vote for Climate Audit instead of JunkScience. I know that the we shouldn't take the awards seriously, but other people will. Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy is a much better science blog and the best…
November 5, 2007
I don't like the way the Weblog awards are decided. Because you can vote once per day per computer you have access to, to win bloggers need to post every day and shamelessly exhort their readers to vote. This felt wrong to me, so when I was a finalist in 2005 and 2006 I ignored the whole thing.…
November 2, 2007
I'm with Silas down at Coogee Beach. There's an alcohol ban in the
park behind the beach so the rummies hang out at the bus shelter next
to the park. There's a bench seat around the side of the shelter
where they can sit without getting in the way of the people waiting for
the bus. I'm walking…
November 2, 2007
Michael Dobbs continues to disappoint as the Washington Post's Fact Checker. In his new column he refuses to correct the mistake he made when he wrongly said that the judge had found "nine significant errors" in An Inconvenient Truth. Instead, Dobbs writes:
Contrary to Kreider's assertion, the…
October 26, 2007
The Lancet provides a brief history of the attempt to eradicate malaria.
In 1955, WHO set out to rid the world of malaria. The campaign, called the Global Malaria Eradication Programme, focused on vector control. The plan was to interrupt malaria transmission primarily by attacking the malaria's…
October 24, 2007
John Stossel is his usual misleading self with a piece denying anthropogenic warming. Video here and summarized here. Tamino details the way Stossel deceives his viewers:
Probably the most irritating aspect of Stossel's "report" is a brief clip from An Inconvenient Truth of Al Gore saying, "...…
October 22, 2007
Yose Widjaja, one of my students, has written a cool graph visualization system. The easiest way to get a feel for the way it works is to look at a video:
We're looking for comments, new graphs to visualize and so on. He has a blog for the project here, where you can download a demo and learn…
October 22, 2007
Pinko Punko visited DC and took some pictures, including a couple for us. The American Enterprise Institute:
And the Completely Evil Institute: